“All this godlessness that’s going round can cause nothing but unhappiness,” Kim’s mother said. He saw her glance above the mantelpiece and return Christ’s look of sorrow.
“Why should the director be unhappy?” Terry argued. “He has a vision.”
The Brichester Herald came down like a veil. “But not a belief. Anyone who destroys more than he creates must be miserable beyond expression. Question what you see by all means, but believe in something first.”
“What do you believe in?”
“What’s around me,” said Kim’s father instantly. “Not politics disguised as panaceas, not poets trying to be philosophers. This house. My job. Reality.”
“There’s only one right and one wrong,” Kim’s mother told her. “Those who don’t take the right road know they’re doing wrong.”
“That’s my exit line,” Kim’s father said, taking out his pipe and striding to the sitting-room.
Her mother carried out the first plates; Kim stared after her, toward the angel. Terry touched Kim’s fingers. “You didn’t say anything,” he rebuked.
“Why should I, Terry? I’m happy.” She pressed his hand and followed her mother with plates. In the garden he could see the gnomes; faceless now, they were grey lumps of stone like memorials. Behind him the light was switched on; a luminous female reflexion engulfed a gnome. “Terry,” Kim’s mother whispered, “it doesn’t matter what you believe, as long as you understand Kim enough to make her happy.”
Her mother was ironing a cardigan; she folded its arms on its chest. The scent of warm wool streamed out the open window. Kim took a cup from the kitchen table and carried it brimming to her father. As he set aside the Herald he said: “You don’t like those objects in the garden, do you?”
“I suppose they’re pagan. But that’s not the point. The point is, they’re Terry’s.”
“That’s certainly not the point. If you object you must tell him. If you suppress it you’ll kill your beliefs. I’ve seen this happen. I know.”
“I’ll have my coffee in a minute,” Kim called into the kitchen. She’d packed the picnic basket for tomorrow; now, as always before she went to bed, she communed with her garden. The air was soft as fur. Soothing, the flowers weaved gently in the breeze. But the night was jagged, torn by the harsh stones on the lawn. Perhaps she might persuade Terry against them after all, but not on her father’s advice; she knew where that led. She looked toward Mercy Hill; lights moved across intersections — perhaps one was Terry. She tried to isolate his window from the display, and was distracted. A grey cat was slinking somewhere on the lawn, about to brush against her leg. She glanced down, but there was nothing; colourless grass, the back of a stone head. Turning, she closed the front door and saw the angel.
As Terry drove to collect Kim, a clock struck midday. His hand rose from the wheel; he’d made half the sign of the cross before he knew. For those who’d died during the hour, as he’d been taught. His hand dropped. He didn’t believe. “Pray to believe,” he’d been told — but he saw this as more delusion that paradox: praying to something he didn’t believe in for help to believe it existed. Yet he feared to think too deeply on his unbelief; he’d accepted a hostile universe, he couldn’t be expected to do more. “Believe in something first,” he addressed the windscreen ironically. “In Nazism? In the unholiness of blood transfusion?” He passed the church, its stained glass exalted by the sun, and stopped before the Sunday school where Kim taught; beyond, cars glinted on the hills.
In the red house children sang. Terry went round to the back seat and settled the hamper which Kim’s mother had given him when he called. “If it rains don’t forget you can come back here,” she’d said. A troupe of Girl Guides marched past, their blouses blue as the blinding sky. The door of the red house opened; Kim’s class surged out. As Kim appeared, the pleats of her mini-dress pink as a flower, a boy and a girl ran past Terry hand in hand. Kim kissed him. “In front of my class, too. I hope we don’t corrupt them,” she laughed. “I’ve got you a little present. Don’t hate it, Terry.” She opened her hand; a St Christopher medal gleamed gold.
“All right, my darling,” he said. “If you think I need protection.” He fixed it between them on the windscreen.
He let Kim choose the hill. A dry bare path led up through undergrowth; she ran upward to the smooth grass, her pink pleats flying. Terry dragged the hamper to the top, stopping to survey the countryside: distant tufts of trees, hills still against the piercing blue horizon where skimmed a lone white bird, darting butterflies like windblown scraps of paintings. From the top he could see the toy roofs of Brichester, like red plastic; the trees of Central Park located Kim’s house; but his eye was drawn beyond, to the great forest in which Goatswood was set as in a ring of green velvet. “Look at it,” he said.
“Don’t look at it,” said Kim. “Look at me.” And as he did so, the countryside blurred.
The grass on which they sat before the empty hamper was warm as the sunset, but the air was cooling. Some of the cars beneath the hills had gone home. “Shall we go down?” Kim asked.
“I think we might.” Terry stood up and cast stray papers into the hamper. Suddenly he moved it to stand against the shadowed amphitheatre of Goatswood. “Can I have the lunch-box?” he asked.
Kim couldn’t see what he was doing; she passed him the lunch-box, which he set atop the hamper. “A tribute to the forces of the earth,” he said.
A stray breeze caught the lunch-box tabernacle and rolled it rattling toward Goatswood.
They were close to her house when Kim said: “Let’s go into the park for a while.” The gates were open; Terry drove onto the gravel. Near the gates a man was prowling with THE WAGES OF SIN on his chest and the rest behind his back; a bearded prophet clung to an unsteady stand and exhorted evening lovers to take note of the imminent end of the world. Kim caught Terry’s eye and smiled up at him. “That’s not me,” she said.
The trees had trapped the twilight. The branches which the sun had dappled were brown stains on the shadows; leaves moved like hives of darkness. They followed a walk they’d found one day. At its end glimmered a Chinese pavilion. As they emerged from the trees onto shifting pebbles, Kim’s hand brushed a twig from which a ball hung, tiger-striped, and startled it into myriad tiny spiders, spun away on threads by a breeze.
In the pavilion Kim lay against Terry. His mouth moved round her neck, and she pressed into him. Through the pavilion’s pillars she could see the trees, leaning forward like spectators. She felt him touch her breast. “Not too much at once,” she whispered.
“I promise.” His hands caressed her. Her eyes closed. As her lashes met, she glimpsed movement between the pillars. A small pale figure darted back among the trees; the crushed grass staggered erect. Children, she thought, spying before they understood. “I think we’re being watched,” she said in his ear.
“I think we’d better go back to your place.” Her parents were at a whist drive. They left the pavilion, arms about each other, and entered the wood. Looking back, Kim saw the pavilion, gleaming like a skeleton; she shivered. As they passed a tree a face peered out behind them. Of course not, she thought: the children wouldn’t follow. She pressed her face into the warm cloth of Terry’s jacket.
She felt safer in the car, her hand on his knee. But as the car swung about to return to her house, she chilled for a moment. Then she relaxed; what she’d seen photographed between the trees by the headlamps must have been bushes of pale blossom, swaying in a breeze.
Terry bore the cups of coffee high into the front room, as if for ritual. Sitting on the couch, they sipped. Then Kim traced the back of Terry’s neck with her fingertips and let him draw her closer. In a minute she’d switch out the light. She thought of Terry coming home each night, of a sitting-room whose details were vague except for the two of them on a rug before the fire. Then the back of her neck prickled. It wasn’t the heat. She sensed eyes.
She caught his hand. “Terry, someone’s
watching,” she said.
“What, here too?” He sat up and stared about. His eyes passed over a gap in the curtain and fixed on Christ in accusation. “God,” he muttered. “Don’t tell me this is a subtle Catholic objection.”
“Oh, Terry,” she said miserably.
“Well, whoever it is can’t be out here, can he?” He ripped back the curtains; light flooded out on the gnomes, drawing immense shadows. “He must be in the room.” He indicated, and floating truncated above the garden, his reflexion waved its arms. “I mean, God — if you believe in him — created nature, sex is the word. Why feel ashamed?”
“It wasn’t that at all, Terry. I love you.” Kim sat on the couch; her head sank.
“I know you do.” But he felt religion in the air between them, invisible as her perfume. “Look, it’s just that I wasn’t expecting this. I think I’d like to be alone to work it out.”
If she’d said “Please don’t go” — But she could say it only to herself.
As Terry climbed into his car the front door opened. Kim didn’t speak. His last glimpse was of her framed in the bright doorway beyond the stone figures; it was like a temple or a sacrifice.
“He hasn’t phoned,” Kim wrote. It was the next day; the diary had been Terry’s present — she’d admired it once in a shop. Her eyes closed. She tried to control herself, but already her face was pressed into the bed, the white sheets cold as an isolation ward. She’d had to leave the table earlier to come upstairs and weep. Her mother had been about to follow her, but Kim had heard her father say: “Let her come to terms with it. Her beliefs will see her through.” Her beliefs! She looked up at the crucifix above her bed with something like hatred. Would she give that up for Terry? But why should she have to choose? She remembered a scene when she was twelve: her father coming home, shaken by a car crash, shaken more to find he’d been underinsured and they might have to sell furniture. “So long as you’re alive,” her mother had said. “I’ve prayed every night that if this happened you wouldn’t be harmed.” And he’d exploded. “God didn’t buy this house! God won’t have to go short to pay for the damage!” Kim had sat trembling on the couch; at twelve it had been as if the house shook. “We won’t have to sell my pictures?” her mother had pleaded: the angels which had guarded her family for generations. Kim had stuffed her fist in her mouth and buried her head in the couch; but she’d heard the angel shatter. “If they were worth anything — ” For a week after that they’d sat silent as wax dummies in an exhibition room, except when her mother broke and rushed upstairs. It was over now, but not for Kim: that had been when she’d determined to be tolerant, for that was all that preserved love. “Oh, Terry,” she sobbed, “I tried to please you, not to argue with you! If only you’d do that same for me!”
When it was over she lay exhausted on the bed. Her head throbbed. Deliberately she turned over the blurred pages of the diary. Terry told me today he loved me. I think Terry is looking for a house, but he hasn’t said so yet. June 24.
Midsummer Eve, of course. She threw the diary on the dressing-table and went downstairs.
Her parents were visiting friends. The house was empty; only the ten o’clock dusk moved through the rooms. She poured herself a glass of orange juice and gulped it down, feeling slightly sick. Drawing the front-room curtains, she switched on the television.
As the room’s bulging reflexion was ousted by an announcer’s face, a car drew up outside. Kim ran out. For a moment she thought it was Terry; she had opened the gate before she realized. Downcast, she returned to the house, kicking the door behind her. The grey heads stared toward the road, except one. A child must have dislodged it with a ball; it faced toward the house.
“I just don’t know how our relationship may stand,” Terry said. He didn’t know whether they could hear him at the bar; he didn’t care. But he wouldn’t admit even to himself that he was ashamed of last night.
“Still talking to yourself?” Ted Pyke asked. His face swam forward through the yellow light like a shark closing for the kill. “You look a bit off. Trouble with the girl friend?”
“Something like that,” Terry said. “Go to hell,” he hissed.
“I wouldn’t mind a lift to Goatswood. If you want a free introduction — ”
Terry remembered the girl whose bare leg had brushed his in the sunlight. “Don’t be so eager,” he told Pyke. As they’d watched the sheep flee into the church Kim had touched his hand; she hadn’t agreed, but she’d tried to understand what he felt. “I’m going to see her,” he said abruptly.
“I may be walking that way later,” Pyke said, turning back to the tv above the bar, two flickering lovers in bed, encouraged by the drinkers.
The lovers threw back the covers; the girl stared and trembled. Footsteps plodded up the stairs toward them. It was her father. Kim watched, unwillingly fascinated. The father took shape from the shadows, looming above them.
The footsteps continued. Kim leapt forward and turned off the father’s voice. Silence, heavy as stone; yet she was sure she had heard the footsteps plodding upward, here in the house. Again she prickled, not with heat. She tiptoed into the hall and was confronted by the angel, radiant, calm, detached.
Beneath the angel the telephone rang.
She caught up the receiver. “Who’s there?” she cried.
“I’m sorry about last night,” said Terry’s voice. “Truly I am.”
“So long as you’re still here,” she said. But he wasn’t really there; he was attenuated as the wire; hardly anything of him reached her. She listened for the footsteps.
“I’m coming round to see you. The phone is in our way.”
The footsteps must have been an echo in the television. “My parents will be back soon,” she told him. “We must work this out together, just the two of us.” The wire whispered, voiceless. She’d said the wrong thing, she thought. She didn’t dare to call to him, to make sure he was there; he might have left the phone box. Finally she dropped the receiver back on the hook, like a stone whose weight was too much for her.
When she turned she saw that the front door was open. She hadn’t kicked it shut. The gnomes had merged with the dusk which filled the street. She closed the door.
Perhaps Terry was on his way. Reflected on the angel, she saw her face still traced by tears. She wanted to welcome Terry; he mustn’t see her like this, she didn’t want to be pitied. She ran upstairs.
As she collected her makeup bag from the bedroom she smiled at her crucifix. Hurrying to the bathroom, she switched on the light. The neutral tiles reflected back Terry, the rug before the fire. She washed and analysed her face before the full-length mirror. Her compact clicked. Imperfectly closed, the door at her back crept open. A blade of light opened along the landing floor. It cleaved the mirror and found a face,
Kim whirled. The landing carpet was bright as grass. Of course there was nothing; she had seen merely lumps of shadow, a curve which she couldn’t now locate had seemed a grin — perhaps the corner of the landing beyond her parents” open door. “My nerves are on edge,” she said, “but Terry’s coming.”
She powdered her nose. Close by she heard a smash of glass. “A bottle in a dustbin,” she said before she could ponder. Deliberately she switched out the bathroom light, braving the darkness. She crossed the landing to her room, and heard slow footsteps in the hall.
Not Terry, surely? Could the front door have opened again? Were her parents’ home too soon? “Hello,” she called. The grey stone silence inched toward her. Footsteps clumped up the staircase in the television — but she’d turned off the sound. She ran to the light-switch by her parents’ door, and tripped.
Her makeup bag spilled; her compact clattered down the stairs. She heard it clang against something she couldn’t picture halfway up the staircase. One hand comforting her bruises, she felt for what she’d tripped over. Before her fingers touched the wall they recoiled from something like a stone saw, a thick hook, deep cold pits in which something rolled: a
face.
When Terry drew up before Kim’s house he realized first that the gnomes were gone. The pebbles had exploded wide, discolouring the lawn. So Kim had moved them. In a way he was glad; she’d asserted herself. They could talk and maybe move toward a deeper understanding. He strode up the path between the obscure flowers. The front door stood open; the frosted-glass pane had been smashed.
“Kim!” He rushed into the house, dashing into rooms, switching on lights. On the stairs lay Kim’s powder-compact; it had been trampled, clumsy footprints faded toward the hall, a large burden had been dragged through the mess, streaking the wall. The bathroom mirror met him; in the other rooms Christ stared down, sorrowing. Terry charged downstairs again, into the kitchen. The back door was open.
Beyond the hedge the trees in Central Park had begun to dance. A new moon hung above them, like a lopsided luminous grin. Terry ranged about the garden. The flowers had closed, unseeing. The clothesline was drawn across the sky like the line at the end of a story. In the hedge he found a gap, where something large might have been dragged along the ground and through into the park. Terry tried to squeeze through, but the hedge grasped his shoulders. He dashed past the rockery, then froze. On the rock liquid glistened. Sick, he bent and caught a drop. It was black on his finger beneath the moon; it might be water. He ran into the light from the kitchen and held out his finger. It was blood.
As he climbed the railings of the park, tearing himself free of the spears, he snarled: “If you take Kim, whoever you are — ” He remembered the angel he’d passed. The phone: he could have called the police — but to go back now might be to lose Kim. He forced himself to stand still and listen. Branches battled and broke loose, but only in the wind. He plunged into the wood. The trunks were still as pillars; the branches held the luminous grin. Ahead something rushed through the undergrowth, perhaps the midsummer wind.
Deep in the woods he heard a cry. An owl? He couldn’t know. Deafened by the ecstatic leaves, he strained his ears. Then he heard ponderous footsteps on wood. He drove himself through the trees toward the sound. At last he saw a distant clearing, trees like a Druid circle, a building which might have been a temple within. His feet flung pebbles wide, and he saw where he was. Before him, ossified by moonlight, stood the Chinese pavilion.
Demons by Daylight Page 19